WIRED Binge-Watching Guide: Black Mirror

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WIRED Binge-Watching Guide: Black Mirror

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This is just a guess, but we're betting you came to Black Mirror through a friend's recommendation. We'll also wager that recommendation somehow involved the phrase "modern Twilight Zone." Are we getting warm? Well, guess what. Your friend isn't wrong.

Read More Binge-Watching GuidesThe WireSons of AnarchyHouse of CardsThough it's got about 150 fewer episodes than Zone, Charlie Brooker's six-part (seven-part, if you count the Christmas special) British future-dystopia series is the digitally adjusted equivalent of the show that scared the bejesus out of nice families with its eerie what-if criticisms of 20th-century America. And like that show, it slightly alters the otherwise unremarkable everyday lives of its characters just enough—through advances in tech this time—to render them unsettling. Black Mirror, like The Twilight Zone, isn't exactly horror, but it will give you nightmares all the same.

Now, three years after its 2011 debut, the show is finally getting stateside acclaim, thanks to its arrival on Netflix this past December. Because the show is an anthology—each episode is self-contained, and it's unclear whether they're even occurring in the same future time-frame—there's a lot of room for debate about the level of innovation and overall quality in each individual installment. But that, of course, is also the precise reason why the show is rapidly approaching hall-of-fame territory. (Hardcore fans of anything love a good debate, after all.)

But one thing to be aware of going in: Your affinity for any of *Black Mirror'*s myriad dystopian premises will depend on which particular advances in tech raise the hairs on your neck. Is your worst nightmare the proliferation of life-cataloging via Google Glass-esque implants? Or perhaps is it the endless cycle of labor for the sake of soulless, cruel consumerism abetted by the ever-richer mass media machine? Or maybe it's the even crueler and more unusual punishment for high-profile criminals in the name of public satisfaction? Well, they're all here to completely freak you out. And no matter what your pleasure, you'll find a great takeaway—even if it's just a plot point to reference whenever someone mentions a desire to have a robot doppelgänger for household tasks. Keep this one in your back pocket.

Black Mirror

Number of Seasons: 2 (six episodes, plus a Christmas special)

Time Requirements: 5 hours, 57 minutes. (You'll finish in the span of a Saturday afternoon, basically.)

Where to Get Your Fix: Netflix

Best Character to Follow: All of them (or none of them, if you're a hater), since each episode features its own original cast. However, the most iconic are Daniel Kaluuya's Bing ("15 Million Merits"), Agent Carter Hayley Atwell's grieving girlfriend Martha and, of course, Jon Hamm's creepy pick-up-artist-turned-something-far-creepier Matt Trent ("White Christmas"). Their stories are either tragically relatable or straight-up twisted, which of course makes them the most resonant. (Jodie Whittaker's Ffion in "The Entire History of You" is also great, if only because her name is Ffion. Ffion! Like Fiona, but weird. God love the Welsh.)

Seasons/Episodes You Can Skip:

If you're a Black Mirror fan who actually enjoys "The National Anthem," please, identify yourself immediately, because you, dear reader, are a magical unicorn indeed. The series' first episode is most often referenced in the context of assuring new viewers that said episode should have no bearing on their opinion of the show, since it is The Worst. In a nutshell, it's about an Anonymous-esque Internet terrorist who kidnaps a British princess and then extorts the fictional Prime Minister into, ahem, porking a pig on live national television. A lot of TV shows take a minute to get into before hooking new viewers, but luckily with Black Mirror, you're not obligated to watch every episode since none of them have to do with each other. You can also easily hop over Season 2 closer "The Waldo Moment," because it is very bad, in all the wrong ways. It's a total despairing drag, which is great, but comes without a particularly original message, which is what each episode needs to work. (Still, you might want to stomach these both at some point, just to have done so. The series is only six hours long, after all.)

Seasons/Episodes You Can't Skip:

Everything else. Come on, if you were looking for a cheat-friendly sci-fi series, try binging The X-Files, Doctor Who, or Fringe instead. If these seven episodes (or six if you're gonna skip the, er, pig-spitting fiasco) are all we're going to get, each of them ought to be treated as precious.

But since there's not a lot of guidance we can give you beyond "watch all of them," here are all seven Black Mirror episodes ranked, from worst to best, so you may organize your viewing schedule.

Season 1: Episode 1, "National Anthem" See above.

Season 2: Episode 3, "The Waldo Moment" A schlubby actor who voices an Insult the Comic Dog-type cartoon character finds himself involuntarily complying with a disturbingly successful political campaign lobbied by the show's executives in the name of said cartoon. People vote for this cartoon. Everything is awful. Feels like a weak 21st century photocopy of a Jonathan Swift story.

Season 1: Episode 2, "Fifteen Million Merits" This installment features a world in which people generate power by stationary-biking as a semi-voluntary job in exchange for points, which can be exchanged for food items, entertainment, and—best of all—a chance to leave the bike room and become a Britain's Got Talent-esque star. Bing, a quiet biker, decides to give Lady Sybyl—sorry, a soft-voiced girl named Abi—his points so she might win the contest and escape such a depressing existence. As you can imagine, everything devolves into a nightmare from here.

Season 1: Episode 3, "The Entire History of You" An insecure jerk torments his wife about an old boyfriend using their "grain" implants, devices that record one's entire life experience for later replays. This one is especially terrifying because, honestly, it's not that far-fetched that we'll soon reach this paranoid, advanced technological (and cultural) point.

Season 2: Episode 1, "Be Right Back" Martha, a complete wreck in the wake of her partner Ash's sudden death, pays for a service that uses all of the online data left by your deceased loved one to create an ultra-realistic digital—and, even scarier, in-the-flesh—replica to help with the mourning process. Obviously bringing your dead boyfriend back to life with his past tweets is not the healthiest route to recovery, and Martha learns this the hard way.

Season 2: Episode 2, "White Bear" A terrified woman (played by super-skilled panicker Lenora Crichlow) wakes up with no memory of who or where she is and finds that the town around her is filled with unresponsive bystanders who, instead of helping her, follow her around with smartphone cameras as she's chased by "hunters" through the otherwise deserted streets. Terrifying in that you'll believe this is a Hobbesian horror story commenting on the randomness of cruelty in society—BUT NO, THE REALITY IS MUCH, MUCH WORSE.

The Christmas Special, "White Christmas" You know what? Just go into this one blind. It's 100 percent more effective that way.

Why You Should Binge:

Plenty of people have already said this more eloquently, but in the digital era Black Mirror, of all shows, feels like mandatory viewing. The show is structurally designed in such a way that it doesn't punish you if you want to watch one episode a day, but rewards your brain if you want to blow through its myriad parables quickly. Also, you don't have to get emotionally involved with a static cast to enjoy the show's brilliance: It's more about how these stories affect your perspective on your life rather than a fictional character's.

Black Mirror is also the first 21st century TV show to portray and criticize modern tech both accurately and consistently—and best of all, without sounding like it's been written by a room full of retirement-aged luddites. (If there's been a better one in the past 10 years, please someone share that information immediately.) These episodes don't scream "TECHNOLOGY IS BAD!!!" They're not too far removed from contemporary life, and they're not too familiar, either. Instead, they quietly, diligently burrow into the heart of what's so terrifying about tech to begin with: our tendency to make stuff that caters to our worst selves. And that, friends, is what dystopian sci-fi is all about.

Best Scenes—The Endings of "White Bear" and "White Christmas"

We don't want to spoil them for you, but the twist endings of "White Bear" and "White Christmas" are both on par with, if not better than, about a thousand multi-season series finales. (Coughcoughcough.)

The Takeaway:

If this show can do this much damage to the current state of original sci-fi TV in just seven hours, just imagine what we might accomplish if Hollywood would chill on the adaptations and spin-offs and start optioning smart, unique, and nuanced social criticism. Oh, also, bring back Black Mirror for a third season. (And fourth, and fifth, and...)

If You Liked Black Mirror You'll Love:

Twilight Zone, duh. Also, look to The X-Files, Fringe, and Twin Peaks for similar mind-bending happenings.